12.11 Resource AppointmentResponse - Content

A reply to an appointment request for a patient and/or practitioner(s), such as a confirmation or rejection.

12.11.1 Scope and Usage

Appointment resources are used to provide information about
a planned meeting that may be in the future or past. They may be for a single meeting or
for a series of repeating visits. Examples include a scheduled surgery, a follow-up for a
clinical visit, a scheduled conference call between clinicians to discuss a case, the reservation
of a piece of diagnostic equipment for a particular use, etc. The visit scheduled by an appointment
may be in person or remote (by phone, video conference, etc.). All that matters is that the time and
usage of one or more individuals, locations and/or pieces of equipment is being fully or partially
reserved for a designated period of time.

This definition takes the concepts of appointments in a clinical setting and also extends
them to be relevant in the community healthcare space, and also ease exposure to other
appointment / calendar standards widely used outside of Healthcare.

12.11.1.1 The basic workflow to create an appointment

Making the Appointment Request

When an appointment is required, a requester creates new Appointment resource with the Appointment.status="proposed".
All included participants (optional or mandatory) should have the status="needs-action" to allow filtering and displaying
appointments to user-participants for accepting or rejecting new and updated requests. Based on internal system business rules,
certain statuses may be automatically updated, for example: "reject because the requested participant is on vacation" or
"this type of user is not allowed to request those specific appointments".

Replying to the request

The reply process is simply performed by the person/system handing the requests updating
the participant statuses as needed. If there are multiple systems involved, then these
will create AppointmentResponse entries with the desired statuses.

Once all participants have their participation status created/updated
(and the main system marking the appointment participant records with the AppointmentResponse
statuses) then the overall status of the Appointment is updated.

12.11.2.2 Constraints

12.11.3 Notes:

12.11.3.1 Time zones and recurring appointments

Recurring appointments need to have the time zone defined in which the values were entered.
Knowing that the start time was at 9:00:00Z+10 does not mean that the same time in 2 weeks is actually the same.

For example, if this was a time in Brisbane Australia, this time would be the same (in respect to its offset from UTC),
however if this was for Melbourne Australia, during the daylight savings period Melbourne time zone becomes +11.
So without the additional information as to which time zone it was created in, scheduling a 9am appointment every
Wednesday would not be possible.

12.11.4 Search Parameters

Search parameters for this resource. The common parameters also apply. See Searching for more information about searching in REST, messaging, and services.